


Saving Grace

by zaphodsgirl



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Canon Universe, Case Fic, Cemetery, Gen, Ghosts, Haunting, Pining Dean, Season/Series 12, spncasefic2017
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-13
Updated: 2017-06-13
Packaged: 2018-11-06 03:37:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 15,306
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11027811
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zaphodsgirl/pseuds/zaphodsgirl
Summary: There's a scenic cemetery in Maryland with several unique features: stone bridges, a natural warm spring, infinity lights, and its own resident ghost. It seems like the kind of straightforward case the boys need after everything that's happened lately, but nothing is ever that easy when you're a Winchester, even a classic salt and burn.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Art for this challenge was done by [kuwlshadow](http://http://kuwlshadow.tumblr.com/)!
> 
> You can view some of the reference pics for this fic at [this link](http://zaphodsgirl.tumblr.com/post/161835358472/reference-photos-for-my-submission-to-this-years)

Dean heads into the bunker's kitchen for coffee, unsurprised to find Sam and his laptop already taking up space at the table; Sam barely nods in his direction but the coffee is already made and for that he's grateful. It's been a rough few weeks and at this point he's going to revel in the tiny victories. Sitting across from Sam, he can't help notice the inquisitive look on his face as he stares at the screen. It's Sam's _does this fit our parameters for a case_ face, so he palms his steaming mug and waits.

"So get this," Sam starts eventually, "it looks as though there's a bunch of people making reports of ghost sightings in this cemetery, and recently there was an actual death. The local paper claims he 'died of fright' because he was babbling about seeing a ghost during the entire ambulance ride."

"That doesn't make any sense, though. Ghosts don't haunt their gravesites, they stick to places of meaning."

"I know, that's what makes this so strange. These sightings started about a year ago, and all the online accounts I've found correlate. It seems, I dunno...kind of easy. Might be a nice break from the overabundance of horrible we've been dealing with lately."

Dean thinks of Cas rotting from the inside, bleeding profusely, begging them desperately to save themselves and leave him to die. He hangs his head and sighs.

"What does it say about our lives that investigating a haunted cemetery is just the thing we need to unwind?"

"It's the Winchester Way, Dean." 

Dean sighs again and leans back, lightly smacking the table with his fist.

"You're probably right. When do we leave?"

**∞**

It takes eighteen hours and three pit stops before they reach their destination, and both of them are glad to get out at the motel and stretch their legs. Dean heads for the office to book a room while Sam grabs their duffels from the trunk. Opening the door to room 12, they both pause just inside to absorb the horror of the themed motel room. The bedside lamps look to be tools, the ones you use to crack open and eat shellfish. The bedspreads have bright red crustaceans all over a blue background, and the carpet is also blue as though it's meant to represent the sea. The kitchenette counters and cabinets are another shade of blue, but thankfully the walls are not. Instead they're seafoam green, and are festively covered with fishnets and fake plastic crabs. Even the small two person table has a crab motif across its laminated surface. They're not even remotely close to an ocean, but the distinct Old Bay theme of the room is so pervasive that you can't get away from it no matter what direction you turned your head. 

"It's like a Seafood Shanty threw up in here," Dean says, but when Sam gives him a puzzled look he just waves him off and walks over to the furthest bed to place his duffel on it.

Years of practice get them situated with a command center set up at the small table in less than ten minutes, Sam clicking away at his laptop while Dean goes over printouts they made before leaving the bunker, trying to figure out their first point of approach. Sam makes a surprised sound that catches Dean's attention.

"This cemetery has an interesting history. It seems as though it used to be farmland, and there's a natural spring that runs through it."

"Well, running water has been linked to increases in paranormal activity, but that wouldn't account for why the ghost is there in the first place."

"Agreed, although it might explain why it's powerful enough to frighten someone to death when by all accounts it seems to be a child. How far back did we say these sightings go?" 

"About a year?" Dean says, flipping through his stack of papers. "Yeah. The earliest account we have here is about 14 months ago."

Sam nods in affirmation before entering the information into his search. "Okay. I'm looking at all the burials in that cemetery during that time frame, we should be able to narrow it down to anyone under sixteen or so and start there."

"Well, I'll do the food and beer run while you work on that," says Dean, abandoning his sheaf of pages and rising from the table. Sam hardly notices when his brother leaves the room, diligently focused on figuring out the problem, finding the solution. He’s always enjoyed this approach to a case, being the more analytical of the two: consider the data, assess the facts, narrow down the possibilities, do the research. 

For once, food isn't Dean’s sole motivation to leave Sam to his work; he also wants to check on Cas, and lately he feels strange showing how concerned he is in front of his brother. He's waiting for their food at a local pizza joint as he listens to Cas's voicemail greeting for the fourth time since they left. He knows he shouldn't worry, that Cas is probably just resting and trying to recover from his ordeal, but worry keeps bleeding into his thoughts and he thinks if he could just hear his actual voice he'd feel better. As it is, he just shoots off a text -- _on a case in Maryland, let me know how you're doing_ \-- and then grabs their order before heading back to the motel.

Sam’s so absorbed in his task that he doesn't even look up when Dean enters again, the hour he’d been gone passing by unnoticed. He waits until Dean is seated again and taking out their food before he speaks up.

"So, around the time these hauntings began they had four burials that might fit what we're looking for. I also compiled a list of names and addresses for the people who’ve reported seeing this thing in the last year. We should probably talk to all the witnesses first, see if we can get better descriptions to narrow it down before we start doing any digging." 

"Agreed. Investigate twice, dig once."

**∞**

There's something about Dean's FBI threads that just irritate him today, and he keeps pulling at his collar or fixing his belt until Sam gives him the look that usually means _stop fidgeting you moron_ , and then he pulls himself together. They're sitting in the cafeteria of the nearby community college, and Sam is running point with their third witness of the day, a boy named Chad who took part in a stunt with a group of his friends, your standard "spend the night in the cemetery" teenage dare. They haven’t gotten much to go on, and even Sam is starting to think this is going to be a really long, boring day; but at least this guy is more forthcoming than the last two.

"Honestly, it wasn't too bad for the first couple of hours. I mean, it's kind of a nice cemetery, and it has roads bordering two sides and you can see the Burger King way off on the third side at night, so you don't feel really removed from civilization even though it's a really big place. It's not even that dark at night, with all the infinity lights, or whatever they're called."

"Infinity lights?" Dean interrupts, not having heard that phrase before, but Sam answers before the kid can.

"Yeah, they're solar powered, so people put them at gravesites now instead of candles. Like the ones people put along their walkways, but they make them for gravesites, too. Crosses and such." Dean huffs and raises an eyebrow before shaking his head to himself. "Sorry, go on."

"It's OK. If you don't know what they are it can seem kind of eerie, walking around with all these blue lights spread through the gravestones, but people have been doing it for years so I'm used to it now. It was a cool night for summer, but we weren't really cold so we'd been hanging out for a while. It was like a picnic, we had snacks and some beer and were just passing the time, you know?" Sam nods.

"About what time did you notice something strange?" 

Chad cranes his neck back, staring at the ceiling for a minute before answering. "It was probably around two in the morning, I guess? We were getting tired by that point, but everybody was trying to stay awake, and then the candles all blew out."

"Candles?" Dean queries.

"Yeah, we'd brought a bag of those small tealights and had set a bunch of them on the nearest gravestone, and we'd just lit new ones not long before. They last about four hours and we'd gotten there at nine, so we'd already had a set burn out and replaced them. They weren't close enough to going out on their own, but suddenly they all just..." and he makes a sweeping motion with his hand, indicating how they'd all blown out at once. "And we just looked at each other like 'did you see that?' and then it suddenly got cold and I saw my next exhale." 

Sam exchanges a knowing look with Dean before gesturing at Chad to go on. 

"Everybody got really freaked, and started getting up and grabbing their stuff to go, like we all understood that it was time." He pauses to take a big breath. "It was coming up on us pretty fast, and it looked almost like those infinity lights, just much bigger, the way it glowed a bit, but as it got closer I could make out that it was a person. Not a grown up, but not exactly a little kid either. A girl, I thought, except..." he stops, looking down at his hands.

"Except what?" Dean prompts. 

Chad shakes his head a little, like he can’t believe what he is going to say next.

"She was bald."

"Bald?" Dean echoes. Chad nods. 

"Yeah, I mean...at first I thought it was a boy, but once it got close enough I could make out that it, I mean she, was wearing a dress or a nightgown or something. Her face looked really girlish, too, until," and he suddenly stops talking, breath catching in his throat as his eyes widen, remembering.

"It's okay," Sam prompts deftly, as he always manages to do. "You can tell us." Chad takes a breath, nodding his head before he continues.

"As she got closer to us, her face changed. She looked curious at first, like she was trying to figure out what we were doing, and then her face twisted up terribly, like she was suddenly furious, and she raised up her hands like she was going to scratch out our eyes." He shudders a bit. "I know she seemed like a little girl but it was still terrifying. We ran, pell mell, just fleeing in all directions. I actually tripped over a headstone and took a dive face first into the dirt, but it barely slowed me down. It wasn't until the next morning that I realized I'd completely banged up my knee and scraped the hell out of my leg. My clothes were covered in dirt and goose shit and blood."

Dean's head perks up just as Sam repeats "Goose...?" and Chad nods enthusiastically. 

"Yeah, the spring feeds a pond that hosts a flock of geese, so parts of the cemetery are covered with it. You can avoid those parts if you're thinking straight, but obviously none of us were. We looked like a bunch of refugees the next morning, after we'd driven around a while and then crashed at my place."

"Can you describe the figure to us any more? Age, height maybe?" 

"She didn't come up to my shoulders, so less than five feet tall probably. She looked about ten years old before she scared the shit out of me."

Sam nods solemnly, and thanks him for speaking with them. He waits until Chad shoulders his backpack and walks away before turning in his chair to face Dean, who's leaning against the nearby window, sipping from his to-go cup.

"That's probably the clearest description we've gotten so far," he says, as Dean comes over and flips Chad's vacated chair around to straddle it, facing him.

"A bald little girl ghost? That one's new, even for us."

"Yeah, but it would explain why there was confusion in the accounts about whether it was a boy or a girl." 

"Probably. We should check the burials you pulled earlier and see if any of them fit this description before we focus on one of them. Talking to the parents of dead children: never a pleasant experience." 

"Agreed. Let's narrow the field."


	2. Chapter 2

It doesn’t take long for them to focus in on a target once they’re back at the motel, since there’s only one girl. Even if the witness was mistaken, the boys were all closer to eighteen than not, and the girl was eight years old.

"Kaitlyn Masters," Sam reads from her obituary. "I tracked her cause of death to an article a week before her obit, she was hit by a car on her way home from school. Apparently she crossed the street against the light without looking, driver that hit her stopped and immediately called police; records indicate that he was absolved of any wrongdoing."

"Eight years old seems young to have unfinished business, but a death that jarring could definitely keep her around," Dean says, peering at the screen over Sam's shoulder before heading to the mini-fridge for two beers. He twists the caps from both before handing one to Sam and taking the seat across from him, tossing the caps into a garbage can that looks like a shaker of Old Bay. "I can't figure out why she'd be attached to her grave, though. Site of the accident I would expect, or maybe even somehow latching on to the person that hit her, but this one's a little baffling."

"I know. Well, we've had ghosts attached to bits of their remains before, though there's usually a better reason. Maybe she was missed by a reaper somehow? Enough things have been in turmoil over the years that it's entirely plausible. You did kill Death." Dean huffs a bit and nods his head in acknowledgement. 

"Point made."

"It doesn't seem important enough to figure out the why, exactly, in this case."

Dean rubs the back of his head a few times before pinching the bridge of his nose. "I dunno. There's something about this that seems too easy. It just doesn't feel right, somehow."

Sam sits back in his chair, taking a sip of his beer before regarding his brother across the table. "Well, if you've got another angle, let's hear it."

"No, I don't, it's just...something. Can't put my finger on it. I mean, I just get the feeling we're missing something. It can't be this easy. I just don't think this is the solution."

Sam closes the laptop, finishing his beer before standing up from the table. "Well, there are no bodies to examine, so we're not making a visit to any coroners, and we've already canvassed the witnesses."

"We haven't visited the crime scene, as it were. I say we find something to eat, and look into the specifics about the place itself. We can make a trip there after dark." 

**∞**

When they make their way to the cemetery well after sunset, Dean sees immediately what that kid Chad meant about the place being strangely lit. He pulls into the cemetery's drive off of the main two lane highway and through a pair of stone pillars, gates wide open, though from their oxidized appearance they probably haven't actually closed for many, many years. The drive through the property wends and weaves with no apparent purpose, going on strange curves that seem to have been made without foresight. As the road bends to the right he can see two enormous structures at the top of the hill, so he heads in that direction.

There's a large lot between the two buildings, and parking in front of the lower one leaves the Impala out of sight of the main road, too far from the other bordering street to be visible. As they get out of the car, he sees the aforementioned Burger King roof opposite the lesser border road, mostly obscured by trees, but its familiar red and yellow lights are obvious. When he looks out into the cemetery proper though, there's no denying it: those infinity lights are everywhere, giving the place a strange, unearthly glow, like thousands of stationary blue fireflies burning in the dark. 

They walk along the paved lane out of the parking lot and follow it towards the Burger King side, where the asphalt eventually peters out when it comes to a perpendicular, pitted lane that used to be gravel but now is barely so. They turn left and follow the path to the back of the property, which brings them to another once gravelly lane that is now mostly dirt. On the far side of this they can see a small outbuilding, which they imagine is for tools and equipment, and they spot a backhoe at the rear of that as well. To the left they can see the built up mounds of debris and rock that were removed over the years from the main grounds, now grown over with scrub and weeds and getting higher and higher as they walk along this route, having made another left back at the maintenance building. As they come to the end of this lane, Sam points off to the right.

"The original farmhouse is back this way, and the foundation is supposed to still be there, though it's almost completely submerged by water. The source of the spring, at least where it comes up on these grounds, seems to be back there." He sweeps his hand across the expanse in front of them as they make their way closer. "It runs completely through the grounds in this stream." They come to a bank, marked off by tall reeds that blow every so softly in the gentle night breeze.

They can hear the water now, passing below them, the banks high enough that they wouldn't be able to bend down enough to touch the water itself. The sound of it is soothing as it moves towards their left now, and they follow along. A lane has been built over it in this section, but the water flows freely through a system of small culverts and pipes, and on the other side they can see that the stream widens and deepens, bordered by rock walls that have been built from locally cleared stone, like so many others they've seen in the area. It's beginning to look more like a canal, and they come to a stone bridge built over it further along.

"Did you find out what kind of stone this is?" asks Dean, peering at the bridge.

"Get this: it's limestone. So that and the natural spring..."

"Yeah, it's like a double whammy of paranormal activity attraction."

"Exactly. It could explain why whatever it is was drawn here, even if it's not a place they would have been attached to."

Dean can see how the stream turns into a pond further on, where the geese generally seem to be, and decides they've explored as far as they need to. He likes these shoes, and they're the only pair he brought, so he makes a left to head back towards the Impala. The twisting lanes through the trees would have been difficult to navigate if they were driving, because it's hard to tell where they all lead. Down beyond the pond he can see another building where the two border roads converge, and there seems to be an exit down that way, so he might try and navigate out there instead of waiting on the stoplight at the main entrance. 

He's turning to say something to Sam, to ask if he remembers where that kid Chad said he and his friends were, when he spots something. It's back by the end of the lane that brought them up to where they started walking along the stream.

A small figure, brighter than it should be, moving listlessly among the reeds. 

"Sammy," he whispers as he comes to a stop. They both halt. "I'm not sure what to do here. Usually when we spot one it's actively trying to attack us."

Sam is peering off into the distance, trying to get a better look at it, hefting the crowbar he brought with him but didn't actually think he'd need. "It seems odd to actually run across it. I think we should try and get closer, just see what we can see."

They move among the gravestones with a stealth honed by years of practice more than lithe agility, Dean keeping his crowbar raised at the ready, Sam gripping his tightly though keeping it down by his side. They're about ten feet away from the figure before they can start making it out a little more clearly, and they're even closer still before they're noticed.

The figure looks up, as though startled, eyes round and wide in a pixie face. Dean's certain about Chad's assessment now that this is a little girl with no hair, wearing a nightgown just as he'd described. He lowers the crowbar, slowly, letting it hang by his leg but keeping a tight grip on it. Child or not, an angry ghost is dangerous and he doesn't want to let down his guard completely. The figure watches his movement warily, eyes darting to Sam, trying to gauge the threat. 

Dean puts up his free hand in a placating gesture. The girl looks normal, not warped and twisted the way a lot of tortured spirits get; she even looks a little frightened of them, and he decides to trust his instincts. He inches a little closer, slowly, and then squats down with his elbows resting on his knees, crowbar dangling from his right hand between them.

"Hi there," he says softly, and she stops darting her gaze back and forth to peer at him directly. "My name's Dean, and that's my brother, Sam," he says, jerking his head slightly. She glances over quickly before bringing her gaze to rest on Dean again. "What's your name?" 

It seems to startle her when he speaks, but she doesn't answer him. Instead she shrugs and looks at her feet, which are bare, digging the big toe of her right foot into the grass, twisting her ankle back and forth. He changes tactics.

"Do you know why you're here?"

She still doesn't answer, at least not verbally, but after a minute or so she shakes her head. 

"Are you looking for someone?" Now she looks at him before she responds, this time nodding her head vehemently in the affirmative before whispering so softly that he barely hears it.

"Have you seen my daddy?" she says, doe-eyes full of tears, and Dean sits cross-legged on the grass now, placing the crowbar at his side and leaning on his knees. 

"No, sweetheart, I don't think I have, but I don't really know who he is. If you tell me about him, maybe I can find him for you." 

She opens her mouth to respond, but suddenly she startles, looking back over her shoulder into the dark brush that covers the back of the property. She looks pleadingly at them both, face twisting in fear, reaching out to them before hissing something in their direction and vanishing completely.

Sam moves closer and helps his brother stand up. "Jesus. I don't think she was trying to attack those kids in the cemetery. It looked to me like she was scared, and reached out to us for help, don't you think?" Dean brushes off the back of his pants, looking pensive.

"What was that last thing she said?" Sam asks.

Dean stares into the distance, over to where she'd looked before disappearing. "She said 'it's coming'. And I was right: that wasn't Kaitlyn. This girl has been dead for a lot longer than a year."

"She doesn't look it," Sam says, staring out into the brush, the darkest area of the cemetery where there were no headstones, no infinity lights. 

"No, but the old school Rainbow Brite nightgown she's wearing tells me different." 

**∞**

They walk back to the Impala in silence, and Dean navigates them through the winding cemetery lanes and over the stone bridges to head out the other exit. They head up the other road that borders the property, residential homes all along the opposite side, and as the graves come to an end there's nothing but overgrown woods tangled with brush blocking their view. 

"So, all this land was once farmland," Sam says, gesturing out the passenger side window. "I've got some pages bookmarked about it that we can go over when we get back, but if I remember correctly the property was deserted in the early 1800’s without any explanation."

"Well, that's about 150 years too early for our ghost girl."

"Yeah, it's really strange. Maybe it's another case of a collector, and whatever spirit was haunting the property back then has stayed all this time, latching on to others that he could catch."

"What, like the one we took care of that was taking ghosts hostage and feeding off their energy?”

“When we lost Annie?” Sam asks, soberly. Dean sighs, and the faces of all the people they’ve lost along the way flash through his mind, along with one in particular that’s had too many near misses for his comfort. “Yeah, that’s the one. What was his name, Van Ness?"

"Yeah. I think we should check for disappearances in the area from the time the property went abandoned until now. Maybe ghost girl was a runaway hiding out in the old farmhouse that got caught by him. If that’s what we’re dealing with there will be a trail, we just have to find it."

"Could be," Dean agrees as they pull into the lot. He takes a moment to stow the crowbars in the trunk before heading to their room where Sam is already typing furiously on his laptop, so Dean grabs them a couple of beers before taking a seat.

"OK, so the farm was operated by a family named Groh before they left abruptly. They didn't sell the land, though, so it stayed in their name for another hundred years and then it was donated to the city for its use. It was turned into a cemetery shortly after that. The spring that runs through it starts back where the house itself used to be located; it doesn't look as though it was ever torn down, just left derelict, so there's probably nothing really left standing now."

"Well, that makes the runaway hideout theory more difficult."

"Maybe we should head back over tomorrow, see if we can make our way back to where the actual house used to stand, check out the property. If we park on the road along the woods, we can probably make our way into it without going through the cemetery itself where we can be easily seen."

"Yeah, I'd rather traipse about the woods in the daylight, that's for sure."

**∞**

They hit up what Dean has termed the "decidedly convenient" Burger King for breakfast the next morning, though he doesn't seem all that pleased when he can't get exactly what he wants.

"How can they run out of biscuits at nine in the morning Sammy? That's sacrilege! You can't eat sausage with a _croissant_ , it's like crossing the streams."

Sam rolls his eyes as he contentedly munches his own tasty breakfast sandwich, sipping his orange juice and ignoring his brother's food tantrum. He's used to it, and he knows Dean gets cranky over little things like this when he's really got something else on his mind. He also knows from experience that asking about it is completely useless. Dean's emotional state is like an underwater cave system: vast, uncharted territory that's difficult to navigate and will likely never be completely explored, so Sam tries not to plumb the depths too often.

They park about five hundred feet past the spot where the forested area meets the edge of the cemetery proper, pulling the Impala into the grass along the shoulder, where there's just enough room to park her before the trees. Sam grabs the rough sketch he made that morning after he'd found the plat in the city records archive online, which doesn't show the farmhouse but gives them a good idea of the size of the area they're checking and lets them make some deductions about where it is. They opt to go far enough into the woods not to be seen from the road before they try and get their bearings. 

"I can just hear the spring, actually," Sam says, peering into the distance. "It's likely the house would have been close to the source of it, so we should probably just head in this direction until we hit it and then track it back." The woods are thick with trees but they're not very large, their slender forms leaving ample room for the two men to navigate between them, though the brush on the forest floor is thick in every direction. Enough sunlight makes it through the leaves that it's not even that dim as they make their way towards the sound of running water rippling along, and less than twenty minutes later they've found it. It's shallow but wide here, unlike the deep canal that runs through the cemetery.

They walk along it to their left, against the current, and after another few minutes they come to their destination, or rather, what's left of it. 

There's nothing but a crumbling foundation where the house once stood, and over the years the spring has expanded out to flood out most of the structure, flowing completely through it. Some of the stone walls remain, their ragged forms reaching out of the water as though grasping at the pieces of themselves that are no longer there. Behind it and to the left are the remains of another, much smaller structure, and it looks as though the spring originates there. Sam gestures in that direction.

"That must be the spring house. They'll usually be built around the source, to keep leaves and other debris out of it so people can retrieve their water easily. Probably over time it degraded, and a few really good storms would have helped the spring grow large enough to alter its course and take over this area to include the structure of the original farmhouse." They navigate around what was now a large, shallow pond of slow moving water, rills reaching out along the edges towards drier land. 

"If there's anything attached to this old structure, it has gills by now," Dean says, hands on his hips as he examines the area from behind, but then something catches his eye and he moves towards an area away from the house, opposite the point where they came in. There’s a lot of overgrown brush, but he can just make out part of a wall, and moving some of it aside he spots an opening. It’s a low built structure of the same ubiquitous stone, with the remains of a wooden doorway on top of it. "We've got a root cellar over here."

Sam comes up and helps him clear away the rest of the brush off the structure that looks like a stony hill. "Well, someone probably could hide away in here if they were really motivated," he says, shining his flashlight into the dank interior. "It's not huge, but it's big enough. I'm not really feeling it, though. I just can't imagine a runaway finding this remote place and using this as a hideout. It doesn't look like anyone comes back here at all. Usually the places we find people are a lure for curiosity-seekers."

"Yeah, I'm inclined to agree. So how far are we from the cemetery itself now?"

"Not that far. Less than half a mile, I imagine." 

They both look in that direction, eyes following the stream as it wends its way through the woods and undergrowth, but it doesn’t hold any more answers for them.

**∞**

Dean is a little sick of going back to the motel and doing research, mostly because the crab-themed wallpaper is beginning to damage his calm. Unfortunately, they've exhausted every lead so far that doesn’t include copious amounts of research, having spoken to everyone who reported seeing the apparition and finding nothing telling with the dead guy, who truly had dropped from a heart attack that seemed to have been caused by their ghost. Basically, they’ve gotten nowhere, so he has no choice but to let the research hound in Sam loose and go where his giant book nose takes them.

"How many records are you sorting through right now, anyway?" Dean asks, tipping his head back to finish his beer. It might be time to go on a food run.

Sam types for a few seconds before his brow un-creases and he answers his brother’s question in the longest way possible. 

"Well, this city has about forty thousand people, so they average about 350 deaths per year, and there's another cemetery besides this one. About a third of those will go for cremation, leaving me around a hundred a year, and I'm going through all of the records from the eighties, here."

"So about a thousand. The short answer to that question would have been _a thousand, Dean_ , but okay, I appreciate you showing off with all the math." 

Sam just responds with the bitchface that he relies upon for everyday use. 

"Yes, but I'm trying to narrow it down by sex and age, so I hope when I'm done that we'll only have a dozen. We both got a really good look at her, so we can probably rule most of them out ourselves, just by sight." 

Dean smacks both hands lightly on the table as he stands up. 

"I'll go get dinner while you finish this up. I have got to get away from this wallpaper," he says, but he can tell Sam has already stopped listening.

As luck would have it, he has to pass the cemetery in question on the way, and he decides to drive through it again. He takes the same route as before up to the mausoleums, then takes the lane that winds around the back of the largest structure and meanders back towards the maintenance shed they'd come to before, albeit from another direction. As he comes close to that section, he notices two things that had escaped them the evening before, but in the pre-twilight they’re stark. First is a stack of headstones on pallets, as though they'd received a delivery and had just deposited them back in this lonely corner until they could be dealt with. Each stack is covered with a piece of cardboard and lashed together with plastic strips, materials that seem out of place given the contents. 

The second is that behind the maintenance shed is a large, maroon colored canopy. It looks like a pop up tent you'd use for a barbecue, but Dean recognizes it as a movable shelter for use during burials. It’s on sturdy steel poles with wheels, meant to keep mourners out of the rain or the harsh sun. 

He turns left along the back again, towards the area where they'd seen their apparition. There are people walking around the place at this hour, some visiting the graves of their loved ones, others walking dogs or jogging. It makes him slightly uncomfortable at the thought of doing their job in a place with so much traffic, but if it cleared out after dark the way it had the previous night they'd probably manage it. 

He’s sitting in the pizza parlor again, idly watching the TV in the corner when his phone vibrates in his hands. He opens it to a single text.

_I am fine, Dean. Thank you for asking._

He huffs a low laugh to himself. Castiel, champion of low-level communication. He’s trying to decide how to respond, but then their food is ready so he slips his phone back into his pocket and doesn’t answer at all.

By the time he gets back to the motel, Sam is buzzing with excitement. 

"I think I found her!"


	3. Chapter 3

"Ok, so I actually have good news and bad news. The bad news is that I didn't turn up any pattern of people going missing around this area that would indicate we have another Van Ness situation on our hands."

"Yeah, well that part alone is both bad and good, but you found our girl?"

Sam grabs the drinks and takes them over to the table, sitting back down in front of his laptop.

"Her name is Grace Eakins, twelve years old, died in 1988. I couldn't find any articles associated with the time of her death that point to a tragic accident, but in her obituary it says 'in lieu of flowers, Richard Eakins requests that donations be made in his daughter's name to the American Cancer Society..." 

"...and if she'd been undergoing chemotherapy treatments for a while, she would have lost all her hair. Could definitely be Rainbow Brite, what makes you so sure?" 

Sam spins the laptop around so he can see the picture, and while she still has hair in it and is maybe a little younger, it is unmistakably their girl. 

"I stand corrected." 

Sam reaches for his salad as Dean starts to inhale his own sandwich. "I located her grave, and strangely it's not in the spot where we saw her. I think maybe she's being drawn to that area because of the water and all the limestone."

"Which together act like a magnet for spiritual activity."

"Exactly."

Dean chews thoughtfully, swallowing before he speaks again.

"I drove through again while I was out, and there's a lot of people out there even coming up on dusk. We should probably wait until after midnight, when the nearby traffic has thinned out and there's definitely nobody on the grounds. Please tell me her grave isn't actually near one of the streets." 

Sam shakes his head. 

"No, we lucked out there. It's actually over behind the big mausoleum, so we'll be well hidden from the road."

"Good. Let's finish eating and get a couple hours of sleep in before we do this."

Sam closes the laptop and pushes it out of the way, moving lettuce around with his fork for a few minutes before Dean notices he isn’t actually eating.

"What's the problem?"

"I'm just thinking about what she said. _It's coming._ I got so excited to find her that I forgot about it. Should we still be trying to figure that part out?"

Dean sits back in his chair and looks at the ceiling, crossing his arms as he thinks.

"It bothers me a little. This girl was buried in 1988, but the sightings of her didn't begin until just over a year ago. We could chalk it up to the time it takes some spirits to learn how to properly manifest, since it's different for all of them. Maybe she's just been lingering around, and has only recently learned to make herself visible. The 'it' she talked about could just be another spirit pulled in by the same elements, but we've seen some scary spooks in our time. It stands to reason that she could just be frightened of another ghost on the grounds. No one has reported seeing anything but her, so it could be nothing." 

Sam just keeps pushing his lettuce around as though the answers to the problem are buried in it somewhere.

"You're probably right. If anything, our problem is definitely her spirit. So after tonight that'll be done," he convinces himself, shoving a large forkful of greens into his mouth. 

Later, as Sam faces the door and starts snoring gently, Dean sends another text to Cas. 

_Where are you? Got any leads yet?_

He starts to send _I miss you_ , but instead looks at it for a few minutes before hitting backspace ten times and replacing it with _Let me know if you need anything_.

**∞**

The grounds are, indeed, completely deserted when they come back well after midnight. Dean navigates through the twisting lanes with only the parking lights on, stopping once again in the lot at the top of the hill. The walk to the grave itself is uneventful, only the odd scattering of lights reaching out to them in the darkness like a myriad of earthbound stars. To Dean's chagrin the warmth they'd had since their arrival is apparently over; not only is their breath visible as they dig, but fog is rising from the spring-fed pond and wafting in their direction like set dressing from an old horror film. 

"You know," Sam says, tossing another spadeful of dirt out of the hole, "this might be the first time we've done this where I can actually appreciate the overall creep vibe." 

Dean grunts in response and continues digging, warm enough now from the exertion that he no longer feels the biting cold. Soon enough they hit their target, open the casket, and leap out of the hole. They work expediently to salt and burn the body, waiting only as long as necessary before refilling the hole and heading back to the car. Dean rolls his shoulders as he gets behind the wheel, and Sam cracks his neck. Neither of them addresses what both of them feel: they are getting too old for this.

Dean turns out of the lot, parking lights on again, navigating even more slowly than before. The steam rising from the pond is heavy now, moving among the headstones and obscuring Dean's view of the actual road. The last thing he wants is to ding Baby off some poor sap's headstone, maybe knock one over and call attention to their presence here in any way. He’s glad he'd driven through it at least twice before so he has some knowledge of the twisting curves as they come down the hill from the mausoleums and work toward the secondary exit. 

It’s at the end of the hill after making a left that Sam suddenly sits up straight, pointing ahead, and as soon as Dean looks up he abruptly slams on the brakes.

In the distance they can make out one of the stone bridges that crosses the water, obscured somewhat by the fog curling below it, lapping at the banks of the canal and stretching its tendrils up along the banks. It isn't the bridge that draws their attention as much as the figure on it. A figure that looks strangely familiar.

“Son of a bitch.”

Dean turns off the lights and yanks the keys from the ignition, but Sam cuts him off as they reach the front of the Impala with a warning hand on his chest. 

"Don't startle her, Dean. Let's move slowly. We need to talk to her." Nodding in silent acknowledgement, he lets Sam lead the way. Slowly, they make a beeline towards the bridge, cutting through the headstones on a direct course instead of following the path. She has her back to them at first, but turns in their direction as they approach, as though she is pacing back and forth across the bridge. Eventually they move into her line of sight, and Sam slowly puts up a hand as though to say hello. She stops moving, curious, and waits for them to get closer. They do so as quickly as they dare, and when he’s about six feet away Sam speaks.

"Are you Grace?"

Her eyes widen immensely, and she actually smiles and claps her hands. 

"How did you know my name?" she says. "Did you find my daddy?"

Dean squats down on Sam's left so he can talk to her face to face. 

"No, sweetheart, I'm sorry. We didn't find him yet, but we thought you could help us. Can we talk to you for a little while?" 

She glances off to the left, and Sam thinks she’s looking in the direction of the farmhouse, but he keeps quiet. She looks back at Dean and nods. 

"Do you remember where you saw your Daddy last?" 

"We were in his room. I was always in his room with him, but ever since I woke up here I can't find him."

"Do you remember where that was? Was it in your house?" 

She’s vehemently shaking her head before he even finishes his question. "No. We left our house. I don't know when that was. He said he couldn't be there alone anymore, and we went to a new place where there were other people. It wasn't as quiet as home. Sometimes I had to hide." Dean nods, processing this. They'd be able to research her father when they got back to the motel, get his records, figure out how this poor girl is still tied to this plane. For now he has some other questions to ask.

"Grace...when we saw you last time, you got scared, didn't you?" he asks gently. She looks down at her feet and hugs herself before nodding. "Can you tell us why? We want to help."

She looks in the direction of the farmhouse again, but doesn’t look back at him this time before she answers.

"It's out there, in the darkness. _He_ is, I mean. The sad man. I never saw him before I found myself in this place. He scares me."

"Has he hurt you, Grace?" 

"No, no, it's just...he just _feels_ so much. He feels so much and it _hurts_ and I try to stay away. I don't like that it hurts." Her form starts to flicker a bit, as though she’s overwhelmed, and Dean knows she’s going to take a ghost nap really soon. 

"We're going to help you, okay, Grace? Try not to be scared."

She nods, her slightly glowing form fading in and out. 

"Grace. Do you often try to talk to people you see here?"

She looks off to the side, guilty, before looking at her feet again and nodding. "It's night a lot of the time when I'm awake, and there aren't a lot of people then, but when someone _is_ around I try to see if I recognize them, see if there's someone that might know my daddy. Someone who can help me find him. But whenever I try to talk to people they run away from me." She shrugs a little, as though this hurts her feelings but she’s trying to pretend otherwise. "You're the only ones who stay to talk to me."

Sam looks at Dean and knows they are thinking the same thing: she'd been trying to reach out and ask for help, and it startled one poor man so much he had a heart attack. This time he’s the one who speaks. 

"We won't run away from you Grace, we promise."

The look she gives him is both tearful and hopeful before she finally disappears entirely. Dean stands back up, feeling his knees scream at him, and turns to Sam.

"We have to find out more about that farmhouse."

**∞**

The next morning they’re back on the cemetery grounds, looking far less suspicious than they had the night before. They're doing what Dean likes to call the Bert and Ernie pretext, khakis and a button down shirt and tie with a sweater layered over it. It works for a bunch of different personas, and today they're historians. Dean looks down at himself as he gets out of the Impala and sighs. At least in his suit he feels somewhat imposing, full of authority. In this he just feels...quaint. He checks his phone as they get out of the car, before Sam can catch him at it. Again. Still no reply. He shuts it off and puts it in his pocket.

They make their way up the steps to the largest building on the grounds, which is more than a mausoleum like its counterpart, since it also houses an on-site funeral home and the cemetery offices. Just inside the door they see a man in a suit who looks like a funeral director personified, somber and serious and paler than is probably healthy, but he's pleasant enough as they make their introductions and Sam starts asking him questions.

"We're looking specifically for the history of the land that you're on here. We understand that it used to be a family farm that was gifted to the city almost a century ago, but we'd really like to know more about the circumstances leading up to that, especially any information on the family." The guy actually smiles a bit, and it does wonders to brighten his features. 

"You know, you'll want to talk to Florence. She's our secretary, and she works here in our office, but she's a really good history sleuth as a hobby. She's the curious sort so she's actually found all the information that probably exists about this place. Follow me, I'll take you back there and let her know she can take all the time she needs to help you. She'll be thrilled to talk about her favorite subject."

Florence is, indeed, especially tickled at the thought of "two handsome young men" wanting to talk to her about her own "silly little" obsession. She's short and plump with an infectious smile and a girlish little giggle, and Sam actually flirts with her a bit because he finds her and her giant glasses adorable.

"The thing that interests me the most is what happened to the Groh family to make them just up and leave the way they did. Were they having trouble with the land, was it a bad crop year? There's really no information I've been able to pin down that explains that to me."

"Oh, it was nothing like that, sadly. They'd actually had a very prosperous year in that respect, and were quite well off. There was a lot of town gossip at the time that seemed to indicate there was a family scandal and they left to save face. The property was actually owned by two brothers, Merrick and Garland, and they both lived there as well as Garland’s wife and baby girl. Apparently there was some suspicion that Merrick was keeping company with Garland's wife whenever he was away on business, and the rumor is that they finally came to blows when Garland actually caught them in the act. He took his wife and child and moved them all further south to where he had some other agricultural interests, some orchards in Georgia. That was in 1836, and he'd died by the time the war between the states took place. The daughter had married before the war started, and it was through her that the land passed down until it was handed over in 1937 by her grandson. That's a picture of him, there," she says, pointing to a portrait hanging at the back of the office, over a row of file cabinets. "He said that his grandmother did not have fond memories of the farm, for some reason, and never wanted to return to it. No one in the family wanted to take ownership of it, but didn't feel they should profit from it. About five years after it was gifted the city marked it for use as a cemetery."

"Whatever happened to the other brother? What was his name, Merrick?" says Dean, from where he’s leaning against the doorway. 

"That part is unclear, actually. No one seems to know where he went after the supposed row with his brother, only that they never saw him in these parts again. It's thought he must have gone overseas in shame, to get away from the scandal as well as his brother. I've never been able to find any record of him, so I suspect if he did that he changed his name to distance himself. It's a shame, really. The name Garland Groh is still around, there's actually a road nearby with that name, but never another trace of Merrick." Sam glances at Dean, an understanding passing between them. Their hunter's intuition tells them there is probably a good reason Merrick was never seen again, and the answer to that is likely back on the property of the farmhouse. 

"Well, thank you so much Florence, you've really given us so much more than we could have hoped for!" Sam says, delighting in the blush on her cheeks and shy smile as she waves them out of her office. 

"You boys just pop in if you have any other questions!"

They thank the funeral director on their way out, and Dean is chuckling as they get back into the Impala.

"Oh, man. I really hope somebody wasn't buried in the basement, because I do not want to scuba dive for remains."

"As much as that would suck, I think it's highly unlikely. Also, the spring water would've acted as its own spiritual purification of the remains over time, and probably even washed the bones away by now."

"I sure hope so," Dean replies, mulling it over. "Okay, so husband comes home to find his brother banging the wife, and kills him in a rage, buries him somewhere on the property. Maybe the wife confesses to the daughter later in life out of guilt, that's why she never wants to come back.”

"That might explain why they treated it like it was tainted. There's the idea that a curse on the land can never bring good fortune, and that may be why no one wanted to sell it for a profit, lest the curse become manifest."

"So, donation of the property absolves them and future generations of the wrong that was done there."

"Probably their thinking, yeah," Sam says, tapping his fingers on his knee as Dean drives them out of the lot and towards the exit. They go over the stone bridge where they'd spoken to the ghost the night before, except in the daylight it’s actually cheerful and bright, geese swimming beneath it. Sam’s gazing out the passenger window at the expanse of gravestones when he feels Dean slam on the brakes.

“What the hell?” he says, looking through the Impala’s windshield at the line of baby birds marching across their path. “Are you seriously making way for ducklings right now?”

“They’re _geese_ , Sammy. Little furry baby geese! Do you want me to run over a gosling?”

“If it’s named Ryan, yeah!” 

Dean gives him a dirty look, choosing to change the subject as he waits patiently for all the geese to get safely to their destination.

"Grace said the man she was scared of was sad, right?" Dean says. "Imagine being unable to cross over because you die violently, but you're attached to a place that no one ever comes to. And then they make all the adjacent property into a place that lots of people come to, visiting the ones they love who've passed away. And there you are, trapped in this location, and no one has ever mourned you, and all the energy around you is always filled with despair."

"Yeah, that would make me pretty damn sad."

"These are the times when I think what we do is mercy."

They’re both silent for a few minutes, pondering, before Sam spoke again.

"What about Grace? We haven't figured out yet what's keeping her here. Do you think this abandoned spirit could have latched onto her somehow, and if we find and burn his remains it will set her free, too?" Dean looks thoughtful as he navigates them into traffic, heading back to the motel. 

"I don't think so. She spoke as though she'd never actually encountered him, just avoided him entirely because he put her off. I have an idea though. Maybe we don't even need to change out of these threads, yet."

"What's that?" 

"Let's find out her father's last known address and see if we can talk to him. I have a feeling from what she said that's he's been moved to a home of some sort."

"Either way it definitely looks like it's research twice, dig twice for us this time."

"Son of a _bitch_." 


	4. Chapter 4

Dean turns out to be right, and he tries not to openly gloat about it. Richard Eakins had changed his address to an assisted living facility five years prior, and it’s only about 20 minutes away. 

They pull into the parking lot around mid-afternoon, once again decked out in the full FBI threads that also work best when they’re acting as insurance agents, because Sam doesn’t feel the sweater and tie combo is really "selling the image." The outside looks like a fairly nice hotel, actually, and as they move towards the entrance two sets of doors automatically slide open for them, leading into a well-appointed lobby area in tones of beige and sage. Sam heads over to the desk to ask questions while Dean hangs back, casually observing their surroundings. He takes advantage of Sam’s distraction to turn his phone back on, and it buzzes several times as more than one text message comes through.

“Of course,” he mutters under his breath. “Newton’s Law.”

_Thank you, Dean, but no._

_It’s better if Crowley and I handle this alone._

_I mean alone as in just the two of us._

_Not alone as in I am by myself._

_Please don’t worry, Dean._

He shakes his head in fond exasperation before looking up to see Sam beckoning him to follow, and they move down a long hallway to a large room that opens up on the right.

"Okay, get this: Richard Eakins actually passed away over a year ago."

"Let me guess -- the first sightings of Grace were right around the same time." 

"Yeah, or thereabouts. The receptionist gave me the name of a resident who was close to him, said they spent a lot of their free time together. They called her and she said she'd come down to meet us in here, wearing a big blue sweater," Sam says, looking around the room, but Dean spots her first and gently elbows Sam to get his attention, jerking his head to the left where a petite, elderly woman with long white hair is entering from a different set of doors. Sure enough, she’s wearing a large, cornflower blue sweater with chunky cabling and giant tortoiseshell buttons, clutching her elbows as though she’s perpetually cold. She notices them easily and smiles as she approaches, gesturing for them to sit with her at a table by one of the large windows. 

"I'm Patrice," she says, shaking both of their hands with a firmness that belies her fragile appearance. "Lacey said there were two nice young agents asking questions about Richard Eakins, though I can't imagine why they'd be interested in him," she says, laughing gently. 

Sam gives her that disarming sideways smile that never fails to make him look trustworthy as he sits across from her, Dean taking the seat to his left. 

"Well, ma'am..."

"Patrice." 

"Sorry, Patrice. We're just trying to clear some up some insurance related things with Mr. Eakins’ estate, make sure we have all the documentation correct," Sam lies smoothly, pulling out his notebook and a pen. "You see, we found several references to him having a child, but we're having a lot of difficulty trying to track her down. We were hoping you might have some insight, maybe know her married name, or...?" 

Slowly, the smile slides from her face and the expression she adopts in its place is far more somber.

"I see," she says lowly, glancing away from them to look out the window before clearing her throat and sitting up straighter. "Yes, he had a daughter, actually, but I'm afraid you won't be able to locate her. She died, you see, a long time ago. I don't remember what year it was, exactly, but I know she was very young. It was a sad thing. He never got over it."

"How do you mean?" 

Patrice splays her hands out on the table before her, staring down at them for a moment before curling them back into fists and tucking them into her lap, leaning forward. 

"Well, Rich's wife had died in childbirth, actually, and that in itself was terrible. There were some complications during the birth and he had to choose between his wife and their baby. He told me he knew she'd never forgive him if he let the child die; they'd been waiting so long to have children, you see. So he made the call, though the birth was still so difficult that the baby spent her first few months in the neonatal unit. He buried his wife wondering if their daughter would even live, but eventually he got to bring her home." She smiles, again, just a little. "That little girl was his everything. Grace, he named her, and it was just the two of them in their own little unit. I don't think he ever so much as dated anyone, he was so focused on being a good dad, making up for Grace not having a mom."

Dean fidgets a little in his seat, and Sam pretends not to notice even as he adjusts his own tie.

"Then, when Grace was almost out of elementary school I think, she started having health problems. Took awhile for them to diagnose it, but...cancer. Awful thing to happen to a child." She shudders a bit, clasping her elbows again as if for warmth. "He did everything he could to get her the best treatment, but it took a terrible toll on her little body. I remember he told me that when her hair started falling out he couldn't bear to throw it away, so he kept all of it in a little box, gathering it off her pillow every night while she slept."

Sam glances sideways at Dean, who is rapt with attention now. He can't imagine what that must be like, to watch the sleeping form of your sick child while you gently rubbed your fingers across the cotton pillowcase beneath her head, gathering together all the loose strands, trying not to wake her with the sound of your own sorrow.

"How long did this go on?" Dean asks softly.

"A couple of years, at least. She had osteosarcoma. Cancer of the bone," she clarifies, although Sam nods his head knowingly. "I think he said she was almost thirteen when she finally died, and it nearly destroyed him to bury her."

Sam chews the inside of his cheek, trying to figure out how to phrase the question he really needs answered, and decides to tiptoe up to it. "How did he manage to cope all this time?"

"Well, at first he really didn't, I guess, but he did tell me that not long after he started to feel that she was still with him, and that he'd often talk to her as though she were still there. He said it helped him a lot, feeling like she was still around." She glances out the window again, looking thoughtful. "He never gave that up, talking to her. Sometimes when I was heading over to his room I could hear him, chattering away, though he'd always stop before I could make out what he was saying. Sometimes he'd have out the box where he'd kept her hair. It was a lovely, long chestnut ponytail that he'd carefully brushed and tied all together with a red ribbon after she died, curled up in a little cedar box.”

"That's so sad," Sam says sympathetically. "Do you know what happened to it?"

She sighs, still looking out the window. "You know, when he buried his little girl, he gave her his own plot, the one next to her mother. He didn't want her to be alone, you see." She looks at them, plucking at an errant thread on her sweater. "He made arrangements to be cremated, but he couldn't get a spot near them for his remains. Sad, really, that he'd be so far from them in the end." She shakes her head. "Sorry, I didn't answer your question. He'd wanted her hair to be cremated with him, but it didn't happen, somehow. One of those things. So I placed it into the urn with his ashes myself, before the internment. I didn't want him to be parted from all that was left of her." 

Dean clears his throat and Sam nudges him under the table. 

"Patrice, thank you so much for talking to us. I'm sure we'll be able to dot all those i's and cross those t's now, but it really was nice of you to share that about your friend," Sam says, slowly standing up from the table. She smiles back at him and reaches out to take his hand again.

"It was no trouble. It's nice to talk about the folks we've lost, I think. Keeps them alive in our hearts, you know?"

"Yes, ma'am," agrees Dean, reaching out to shake her hand as well. She wanders back the way she'd come, waving at them over her shoulder as she passes back out through the doors. 

Sam sidles up next to him, whispering in the large room as they walk to the exit. "So he buries her, but without meaning to he keeps her spirit close to him for the rest of his life, unable to let her go."

"And she hasn't gone crazy yet like a lot of spirits do because he's completely devoted to her, and spends time talking to her. He probably thought she was a figment of his imagination or something."

"Or maybe deep down he knew what she was. She mentioned that sometimes she'd have to hide. He either thought people might be able to see her, or they'd see him talking to nothing and get concerned."

They’re out by the Impala now, leaning on its roof, warmed by the midday sun. 

"If Richard Eakins has one of those small plots where you can place your ashes, then maybe it’s in an area closer to the stream where we keep seeing the girl. I can check the cemetery map when we get back to the room to be sure, but I think it’s likely."

"Makes sense. He was buried a little over a year ago, and suddenly she finds herself alone in this place without him, unable to escape. The only thing around is this other spirit she called "the sad man" and it frightens her. If this Merrick guy was definitely killed and buried on the property, he's been trapped there a long time, all by himself."

"That sounds unpleasant."

"Yeah, we're gonna have a great time tonight, I can feel it," Dean says as he swings into the driver's seat.

**∞**

Sam’s hunch turns out to be correct, and he locates the precise location before they head back out to the cemetery again. It’s closer to the road than they’re comfortable with, so as a precaution they move the rolling canopy Dean had spied previously, and unroll the canvas sides that will block them from view. Anyone casually driving by and seeing that would just think it has been set up in advance for a ceremony the next day. Sam manages to get to the urn with little trouble while Dean holds the flashlight. 

"Good, it's metal, so it has a threaded top I can just unscrew," he says, proceeding to do just that. Dean looks around, wondering if Grace will show up, but he sees nothing. Sam somehow manages to fit his giant bear paw into the urn and pull out a little square box, maybe two inches in diameter and an inch high. "Cedar, just like she said." He brushes it off, examining it from all sides. "Looks custom made." He puts it into his pocket before replacing the lid on the urn and putting everything back into place. "We can burn everything together once we find the other remains. I'd rather have a fire on the farmhouse property where it's not as visible."

They make their way into the wooded area from a different direction this time, following the stream back towards the source of the spring. Dean is grateful they'd investigated the farmhouse property in the daytime, because it’s a little easier now to navigate right to it, and once they arrive something clicks for him.

"Sammy. If you were to bury a body anywhere on this property, where would be the easiest place? I mean, all the soil's really rocky -- if you've tilled the farmland you could probably bury it out in the fields pretty easily, but maybe you'd worry that animals could turn it up in the soft soil, exposing the body and giving you away. So maybe..." he turns his flashlight towards the mound on the other side of the property, the entrance to it now a gaping hole that they'd exposed on their previous visit.

"...maybe you'd bury it in the root cellar,” Sam responds, “where you could then shut the door to keep things out, and the coolness of the room would tone down the smell of decay if anyone should happen on the property."

"Exactly." 

They carefully make their way around the springhouse and the crumbling foundations in the dark, guided by their flashlights until they’re aiming them into the dark area of the cellar. 

"There's only a couple of stairs down, they're probably rotted but it's only about three feet so it's not too bad. Thankfully the floorspace isn't that huge, maybe if we dig into the center we'll hit upon something..."

"You can't be here!" a small voice hisses at them from behind Sam, who spins around so quickly he almost falls backwards through the doorway. Dean seems unperturbed as he looks at Grace, standing carefully at the edge of the clearing. "You have to get away from there! Please!"

Dean walks towards her and she doesn’t back away, looking at him with wide, frightened eyes brimming with tears.

"Grace, sweetheart, you shouldn't be here."

"Neither should you! The, the sad man," she stutters, "this is where he hides." 

"I know, but we have to find him if we want to help him, ok? Do you want us to help him?" She looks past him at Sam, and then swallows before nodding her head.

"Can you help him, really?" 

"I think so. That's what we do, it's our job. Do you know for sure that he's in that little place? Can you tell us?" She nods.

"I can feel it. What are you going to do?" she whispers.

Dean squats before her again. He’s closer to her than he's ever been, close enough to reach out and touch her, if such a thing was possible.

"I don’t want to lie to you, okay? We think the sad man's bones are there, and so he's trapped. We have to cover them with salt and set them on fire so he can be free. That's why he's so sad, we think. He's all alone here, and he has been for a very long time. Until you came, there was no one else. Do you understand?"

"I think so. I'm lonely, too. I miss my daddy." 

"I know, sweetheart, I know. We're going to try and help you, too, but we're going to help him first, okay? You really shouldn't be here." 

She stares at him for a long minute before she speaks again.

"Are you going to burn my bones, too?" she whispers, and Dean winces internally at the knowledge that he'd actually already done so, and she doesn’t know. Before he can respond, though, he hears his brother's voice.

"Dean!" Sam calls out from behind him, and as he turns he gets a good look at the spirit of Merrick Groh. He looks haggard, and partially decomposed, like so many of the other horrible apparitions they've encountered over the years. He’s standing between the two of them, facing Dean, his face a mask of righteous fury.

"Oh shit. Sam, get in there and start digging!" But Sam has already jumped into the root cellar, trusting Dean to distract the spirit while he works. Dean raises the crowbar he'd been holding at his side, wishing he had his shotgun instead. It would be filled with salt rounds as it always is with cases like this, but unlike other times they’re entirely too close to a residential area for gunfire of any kind to go unnoticed.

"Where is my brother?" spits the apparition, angrily. Okay then. Definitely Merrick Groh. "Where is he?"

"Listen to me, okay? Your brother, he's not here. He hasn't been here for a long time."

"I know he's not here! I want you to tell me where he IS. Do you have any idea what he has done to me?" He moves towards Dean threateningly, the fury and sadness rolling off of him in palpable waves. Dean swings hard, the crowbar moving through his torso easily and dispersing him into the air.

"Don't!" cries the little girl, and Dean realizes she hasn't left after all. 

"They never listen," he mutters under his breath, and then turns to call out to her. "Grace, you need to go!"

"Behind you!" she screams instead, and suddenly Dean finds himself flying through the air, internally cursing himself for a such a rookie mistake. He lands hard on his back, most of his left hip and leg in the stream, but thankfully missing any large rocks. He’s up on his feet in an instant, eyes darting around the clearing, trying to track his target. There’s movement on his right and he spins to face it, but before he can bring the crowbar down again Grace appears in the space between them, her back to Dean, her hands up in supplication.

It’s enough to stop the other ghost in his tracks, and his demeanor changes dramatically. He unclenches his fists and drops them to his sides, staring at her as he stands motionless. 

"Grace," Dean starts, but she obviously isn't listening. She’s staring at the man that she'd been so afraid of before, and then starts approaching him slowly. Dean wonders what he makes of her, a bald little girl ghost in a pink nightgown with a cartoon character on the front of it. Dean lowers his weapon as she walks away from him, and Merrick Groh goes to his knees as she approaches. Once again tendrils of mist are rolling off the warm spring and drifting across the clearing, curling around the ruined foundations that had once been a home, but is now a prison. 

Dean clears his throat.

"Merrick, listen to me okay? Can you hear me?" The spirit doesn’t answer, but at the sound of his name his face changes, and he looks at Dean, perplexed.

"What did you call me?" he says.

"Uh, aren't you Merrick Groh?"

He glances at Grace, who has come to a stop a foot away from him, before looking back at Dean.

"No. I'm his brother, Garland. Merrick, he...he did this to me." 

All of the pieces click into place then for Dean.

**∞**

**__** _Garland comes home from his business trip, eager to see his wife and baby girl. He's been gone for weeks this time, buying seed for next year's crops, but each journey seems interminable. He's happy to be home earlier than expected from this trip. His wife is not in the house, it seems, so he wanders outside to look for her after poking his head into his daughter’s room and watching her sleep for a few minutes, her tiny hands balled into fists up by her head. He heads to the springhouse, hoping to also ease his parched throat, but finds something unexpected: his wife and his brother in an intimate embrace. He screams at them, feeling furious, and as he's berating his wife for her infidelity he suddenly feels a sharp blow to the back of his head and he falls, face down in the spring. Another blow hits him in the head, and he feels nothing else after that._

_Instead he finds himself outside of his own body, watching the scene before him unfold, helpless to do anything about it. He sees his own blood run out with the current, sees the satisfaction his wife gets at his corpse, the plan she concocts for them to get away from this. They will take everything from the house and flee to one of her family’s estates in Georgia, and she'll pass his brother off as her true husband. He will assume Garland's identity, and no one will ever know what truly happened. They have only to get rid of the evidence, so under cover of night his brother drags his lifeless body into the root cellar and buries it there._

_He is dismayed to find that he can't follow them off the property. He tries repeatedly to touch his baby girl, calling her name over and over, but she doesn’t react to the sound of his voice. Her cherubic face is the last one he sees, as his traitorous wife cradles their baby on her shoulder in the wagon that takes them away from him forever. He follows behind until he can't go any further, then he falls to his knees to the dirt and screams, knowing there's no one who can hear._

_It takes a long time before he can accept that he's trapped here, and no one ever comes. He's alone. He loses all sense of time, watching the landscape change around him and the house crumble as the spring breaks its original confines and the march of years destroys all he's ever known._

_Finally, he notices another presence, another like his own, except it's a little girl, and something about it reminds him so much of his own daughter, the last member of his family he'd ever seen. He tries to contact her. He tries to, but he can never seem to catch her, though one night he gets so close that when she slips from his reach he screams his rage at a man he finds there instead. He screams in frustration and loneliness and blacks out and when he wakes up he's alone again, trapped in the root cellar with his decaying bones, riddled with despair until he senses her presence again._

**∞**

By the time he's finished talking, Garland is sitting on his heels, staring at his hands on his knees.

"How long have I...how long has it been?" he says, not looking up.

Dean breathes out through his nose, rubbing the back of his neck before he answers.

"A really long time, man. Almost two hundred years." 

Garland throws his head back and looks up into the night sky, his eyes filled with tears that pool but don’t fall.

"Such a span of years. I see everything around me and how it's changed, and I can feel it inside. The night sky is the only thing I recognize anymore." The tears fall then, and he puts his head in his hands as he sobs. Grace looks at Dean, who clenches his jaw and looks away. Two hundred years of solitude sounds like an incredible amount of time. He couldn’t tolerate two months of it, himself, without making a deal with a reaper to get free. He wonders idly what waits for him and Sam on the other side when the time finally comes for them to die for good; they’ve already visited all the tourist destinations the afterlife has to offer, really, and none of them were all that appealing.

"I have to go check on Sam. Can you stay with him?" She nods, no longer afraid.

Dean hustles over to the root cellar and peers into the opening, where Sam is diligently digging by lamplight. He jumps down and Sam looks up at the noise, wielding his shovel like a weapon. Dean puts up his hands and Sam immediately backs down.

"What's going on out there? Why are you _wet_?" he says, going back to digging.

"Shut up. I think the situation is contained for now. Did you find anything?" 

"Not yet, but I..." and the tip of his spade hits an obstruction. They look at each other, and then Dean grabs the other shovel and helps Sam clear the dirt away. In the hole is what looks like an old carpet, all rolled up. "I have a feeling this is our boy Merrick."

"Uh, yeah, about that...it's not Merrick."

"What? How do you know?" 

"He told me. He's _Garland_." He fills Sam in on the details as they unwrap the decaying bundle until they determine that there are, indeed, human remains inside. 

"Is that me?" 

Dean turns to see Garland by the entrance to the root cellar with Grace, who is now holding his hand. They both look somber in the low light. 

"We think so," says Sam. 

"What's going to happen now?"

Dean sighs and looks back at Sam. Sometimes he misses the days when he didn't have so many questions about things, when he thought he knew all the answers or just didn't care what they were. 

"I'm not sure. We're going to set you free from this place," he says, nodding at Grace to include her, "but to be honest, I really don't know what will happen to you. After." 

Garland looks down at the girl next to him, and she visibly grips his hand tighter, looking back at him before she speaks.

"I don't want to be here anymore, mister, and I don't want you to be alone here, either." 

He gives her a small smile before turning and wrapping his arms around her. She moves her head and presses her right ear against his stomach, and he cradles her in his arms before turning to Sam and Dean.

"We're ready," he says softly, bowing his head and closing his eyes.

Sam takes the little cedar box, lovingly crafted, and places it carefully into the hole before Dean douses everything with lighter fluid. The brothers stand back as far as they can in the small space, opposite the entrance, before Dean throws the lighter into the hole. As the resulting fire licks up into the cool night, the spirits of Grace and Garland look one another in the eyes one last time before they, too, go up in flames, burning their images onto the retinas of the bystanders as they go.

**∞**

The drive back to the bunker takes them nearly twenty hours this time, since they cater to their sore and aching limbs and stop a little more frequently on the way back. They don't actually speak for most of the trip, and what they do say to one another is only to confirm food choices for whoever is heading into the gas mart while the other one fills the tank. It's not unlike them, this post-case silence, lost in their own thoughts while they try to come to terms with what they’ve seen and done. It's not until they're an hour from the bunker, Sam driving this final leg of their journey, that Dean actually speaks up. 

"Do you ever look back on other cases we've done, before we learned all the things we know now, and wonder if we did the right thing?" he asks, staring out the passenger window at the rolling landscape in the dark. "I mean, I never thought about what happened to any of them after we did what we had to do, not back then. I just...did my job, you know? I did what I was told, and I never thought about any aftermath except the one I could physically see."

Sam glances at him before turning his attention back to the road, looking pensive but offering no insight, letting Dean keep talking.

"I think about all the vampires I killed, you know, and now I wonder if I was wrong to take some of them out. If some of them had been turned but not fed yet, if they could have been saved differently, if I'd just known. I think about werewolves I've killed and I can't help but think about Garth and his new family, and wonder. I think of all the creatures I've killed without a second thought, but now I know the place where they end up: I've lived in it, I've rescued someone from it and I ask myself if maybe there were others like him who deserved better than that fate, you know?"

He looks down at his hands, twisting them together in his lap.

"You're wondering if maybe Grace is worse off now than she was before, because you don't actually know what happens to them after the salt and burn." It isn't a question, but typical Sam getting to the crux of the matter.

Dean sighs and leans his head back against the seat. 

“I miss the days when what we did was just black and white, Sam. I don’t like wondering if I’ve done the right thing here.”

"I think that knowing their ultimate fate wouldn't change your mind, honestly. Everything you know now makes you approach a problem from more angles than before, sure, but in the end you're going to do what you think is best, right?" 

Dean nods his assent, never looking up from his hands.

"So knowing that leaving them as they were, alone and afraid, would only make them worse over time, to the point where more people would get hurt and maybe die, what alternative could you have chosen?"

"I don't know, Sam. Maybe once they actually met, they could keep each other company and..."

"And what, Dean? Have ghost group therapy?" interrupts Sam, incredulously, and even his brother has to smile a bit. They lapse back into silence for a while, Dean collecting his thoughts and Sam keeping his eyes on the road while he let him.

"You know that when the angels die, they go nowhere, right? Just, poof, blinked out of existence. The idea of nothingness, it just seems so, so _final_." Sam nods, knowing that all the various threads of Dean's worries are knitting together into this conversation. "I know that for humans, for us, death isn't final. We know that we'll see people again, eventually. Some of them we have seen again, in ways we didn't expect, obviously."

"Yeah, I'll say." Sam had first been introduced to his own mother as a ghost, then gotten to know her in the past before finally knowing her as a grown woman brought back from the dead. _Obviously_ he'd never expected any of that.

"What if they haven't gotten that chance, Sam? Have we sent them to a place now where Grace will never see her Dad again? Where Garland never sees his daughter? Have we banished them into nothingness?"

Sam glances at his brother again, who is now looking stoically through the front windshield, the muscles in his jaw clenching as he thought. He’s thinking of some other examples, but he doesn’t have to name them aloud for Sam to understand what they are. Sam knows there’s one figure in particular whose recent near-death experience is consuming all of Dean’s thoughts of late, despite his attempts to appear otherwise.

“I miss those days, too, sometimes, when things were just black and white. Find the monster, kill the monster, find the next monster, et cetera, but I don’t necessarily think things were better for us then. We can’t work that way anymore because we’re enlightened now, and it colors everything we do.”

“Except all the colors are in grayscale, making them seem far too related and hard to distinguish from one another.”

Sam grins to himself, enjoying as always the way Dean’s intellectual side creeps out when he forgets about macho posturing. 

“Maybe it was easier on us before, but I don’t think I want to go back to that existence, to thinking that there were only two sides to everything. Look at us, Dean: we’ve aligned ourselves with strange forces to fight the good fight before. Are we evil now because we’ve worked with Crowley, with Rowena? You’ve been a demon! I’m the true vessel of Lucifer!” he cries, impassioned now with the point he’s trying to make. “I should hope that whoever looks at us, at what we do, sees us in grayscale, too, don’t you?”

Dean huffs a small laugh, nodding his head in agreement. He thinks of Rowena, who in her own self-serving way has done the right thing on occasion. He thinks of Crowley, King of Hell, a demon who’s saved the life of an angel more than once, even when it didn’t serve his purpose. Evil beings doing good things despite themselves. He thinks, of course, of Castiel, a servant of God who has shown himself more human than most just because he’s made bad choices, and that makes him a Winchester by right if not by blood. He remembers Cas facing his own death, the prospect of becoming just an empty vessel, with nothing to show for several millennia of existence except a scorched pair of wings on the pavement.

 _“I love you, I love_ all _of you,”_ the last words he thought he’d ever say in this long and recently fraught existence, and the gravity of that statement bounces around in Dean’s mind without cease because there’s something there that needs to be addressed and he just can’t figure out how.

Sam, for his part, finds himself thinking of Mary, a woman held on a pedestal in his mind for so many years, an image of perfection and his own lost childhood. The reality of his mother is so vastly different than anything he ever imagined, because she’s just another person seeking her own redemption, looking for a place that she belongs, and she isn’t afraid to dirty her hands in pursuit of it. None of them wholly good or evil. 

“You’re right,” Dean finally answers, and Sam’s almost forgotten that he’d even asked a question while each of them were lost in their own thoughts. “I know you’re right. It’s just...it’s hard sometimes, Sam. I’ve made the wrong call so many times, even with the best intentions, and now I guess I’m always second-guessing myself in the aftermath of everything we do.”

“Yeah, you’ve always been more reactive than proactive.” 

“Shut up, bitch.”

“Make me, jerk,” he replies, the comfort of their teasing familiarity like a balm. He playfully shoves at Dean’s shoulder before returning his eyes to the road, not far now from the place that is home to them, to their family. A strange family of misfits, all of them in varied shades of gray that somehow fit into the larger Winchester palette. They don’t have a great life, he knows, but it’s a good one in that it has purpose and it has meaning, and that’s enough for Sam as they speed along the dark blacktop in the night, rolling towards home.

Dean pulls his phone back out of his pocket, finally responding to Cas’s last text before they pull into the bunker’s garage. 

_I worry about all the people I love, Cas._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This story would never have reached completion without the amazing assistance of superhoney, the world's best sounding board and beta reader. I promise, you have inherent value.  
> I also need to send love to the glorious whichstiel for being such an amazing cheerleader through this whole process where I felt completely out of my element.


End file.
